All I ever desired

May 10 2003

Catherine Millet's explicit memoir has led to new, surprising encounters with the past. Just ask the German student from page 115.

People are often curious - in a nice way - to learn what the unexpected and spectacular success of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. has changed in my life. It hasn't changed as far as the comings and goings between my home and office are concerned. My daily life is simply punctuated by numerous trips following the translations of my book, but these will come to an end.

In my book, I mentioned Australia as the farthest destination from my home (I compared the feeling this distance inspires with the feeling that comes from sexual freedom), and I am about to visit again. Where will my journey take me next? I will return home, hopefully to pick up the rhythm of writing a book - a book on travel, for example.

I would say that what has really changed is not so much my life as my soul: I can't find another word to indicate a movement that has stopped hammering on the walls of my conscience and that is much more like the random navigation of a child's sailboat on a pond. Louis Aragon, in a book where he evoked memories of his childhood, wrote: "There is a whole art to sleeping together. It is perhaps in that moment of rest that love gives itself away in an undeniable fashion. It is a gentle presence that appeases desire."

The feeling that fills me today is that I have written this book on love - on physical love, that is - and now we are sleeping together. By "we", I mean those people I talk about in the book, as well as those who have read it and who liked it, and myself (forgive me, Jacques, for inviting all these people to our house). And I adopt Aragon's words as my own, endowing the words "love" and "desire" with their broadest meaning, which I suppose was as Aragon intended.

In February last year, I went to Munich, Cologne, Berlin and Dresden. It was a joyful venture undertaken in the company of three women: the press attache, the interpreter and the moderator. We got along very well, and the experience was made even more pleasant because on each occasion we were dealing with large, good-humoured audiences who reacted well. ");document.write("

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In Berlin, we talked with a mixed audience of fans and onlookers in an enormous modern library with glass walls. At the end of the book signing which always follows, just when I thought I had written the last dedication, a figure approached, stealing back from me the startling brightness of the place which I had only just retrieved. In the same moment that I raised my eyes, the voice said: "Hello. I'm the student from Berlin on page 115." I estimate there was a gap of a few fractions of a second between recognising the face and understanding the words. The way things work with me is that what I perceive with my eyes reaches my brain before what I hear with my ears; on this occasion, however short this interval may have been, my visual memory was ahead of my ability to be receptive to what was being said to me.

Page 115 of the French edition contains the paragraph where I tell of my first love affair when I must have been 17; how he was a young Berliner two or three years older, and how the affair had come to a sudden end. The face with high cheekbones, which appeared in the photo I had always kept, superimposed itself in an instantaneous cross-fade on the rounded face that was leaning towards me. But I had a little more trouble following his calculations: he insisted it must have been at least 36 years since we had last seen each other.

In any case, this reunion was fantastic. He didn't ask if he could invite me out to dinner. He said: "I suppose you must have prior commitments, otherwise I would have invited you." I replied that this was indeed the case. In fact, I could have made myself available, but I felt - as he himself must have felt - that after all these years we had plenty of time. On the other hand, I couldn't wait to relate the episode; this included telling some journalists the next day. After it was made public, this story that was "so romantic" contributed even more to the good mood to the trip.

Almost a year has passed and we have finally had lunch together, in Paris. We chatted naturally, not like people who haven't seen each other for decades, but more as though we hadn't seen each other for, say, six or eight years. We came together again after what had been a joint period of waiting during the separation. He explained that he had occasionally looked for me, because he felt our story was not finished. I didn't think it was, either. But I had not actively looked for him; in keeping with my character, I had been content to dream. For a very long time, whenever I was down, I used to imagine that I would meet him by chance on a trip and that this would be the chance to start a new life. (To be truthful, I wasn't so explicit during our conversation.)

Of course my expectation about this man is no longer the same, but nevertheless, to a great extent I find myself in the rare position of having a dream which recurs over many years during my life as a young woman, and then seeing this dream come true. It was one of those dreams you couldn't help pursuing even if you didn't believe in it. And until then, I had thought that writing an autobiography - and the same applies to a sexual autobiography - was a process during which you rid yourself of the person you have been (to the point where, as far am I am concerned, I no longer have any direct memory of the events narrated in the book; I can only remember them through the words used to describe them). On the contrary, it closes a gap, which makes the Catherine M. of page 115 coincide with the person I am today.

But this coincidence is not a weld linking past to present; rather, it is something outside time, it is being able to go somewhere else by waving a magic wand. The improbable meeting took place within a framework which is that of the publication of the book, and the life of a book does not follow the same course as a human life.

However much I tried to respect the truth, I cannot help the fact that Catherine M. is now the character in a book; in other words, more or less a fictional work. And it amuses me to note the extent to which the readings of this more or less fictional work differ, even when the readers are directly involved. For example, the man on Page 115 claims my story is correct, except for one detail. I wrote that we were happy just to caress each other, that we didn't make love. However, he believes he has a memory of us making love. In my opinion, it is not a detail, but by an implicit complicity we will leave the question hanging. The space where we had this exchange is one, as I said, which is partly defined by the book. Like the space in a dream, it is multi-directional. And after all, I can indeed behave as though we had made love 37 years ago and as though now, in a certain way, we are sleeping together.

Catherine Millet (pictured) will appear at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 22 and 23 to talk about "Sex in the City" and "Eroticism".